Hannes Alfven Quotes

With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.

Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.

Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader process of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.

I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.

There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).

I started doing some more specific research on Wales in that period because I like the idea of being authentic to the territory, and with that came the knowledge that there was this great rebellion that was happening with the Marcher barons and conflict with the king. A lot of it wasn't documented by the English.

We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas

You cannot kill an ideology with a bullet. You can only kill it with a better idea.

Pacifism is a nice idea but it can get you killed. We're not there yet. Evolution is slow, small pox is fast.

Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.

They [Japanese whalers] haven't produced a single peer-reviewed international scientific paper in 23 years.

This idea where, in this safe haven for Jews, Jews will threaten to kill other Jews, it wasn't in the brochure.

Good collaboration essentially boils down to personalities who work well together and are able to integrate each other's notes and ideas without killing each other.

I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War blew up more than the bodies of men....It blew ideas away.

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

When you travel, people might not have the same ideas about what is interesting. I'm not really good at compromising when I travel.

Agassiz, when I saw him last, had read but a part of Origin of Species. He says it is POOR-VERY POOR!!. The fact is, he is very much annoyed by it.

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.

We should not focus on ideas that divide us and pull us apart.

From the first time he'd met her, he'd sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people's art and ideas.

Are you trying to weasel out of showing us any of this stuff?" said Zacharias Smith. "Here's an idea," said Ron loudly, "why don't you shut your mouth?" "Well, we've all turned up to learn from him, and now he's telling us he can't really do any of it," he said. "That's not what he said," said Fred Weasley. "Would you like us to clean out your ears for you?" inquired George, pulling a long and lethal-looking metal instrument from inside one of the Zonko's bags. "Or any part of your body, really, we're not fussy where we stick this," said Fred.

A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.

All religion may be centered around a generally good idea, however, this has not stopped its adherents from acting like bastards.

If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.

Anytime you get a group of people, they're going to have different ideas and they're going to want to approach situations in different ways.